Time for “A True Revolution of Values"?

[Diana Bardyn]

Time for a “A True Revolution of Values”?

By admin On January 18, 2012 · 2 Comments [Edit]

By Diana Robinson-Bardyn | New Smyrna Beach

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“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

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I remember a day in the Fall of 1967. I was in high school in northern Ohio. It was lunch break, and I was sitting in the cafeteria with Rita. My next class, first in the afternoon, was Journalism. Our Journalism teacher–let’s call him Mr Yak–would probably have been forgotten by all, if not for the events of that day.

It was a small class, and I was the first to enter the classroom. Mr Yak saw me and began walking toward me. He was talking, saying something about seeing me in the cafeteria. He had seen me eating lunch with Rita. Rita was African-American, and he didn’t think it was appropriate that the yearbook editor be seen having lunch with the ‘colored’ kids.

I was 16. I wore my hair long and my skirt short. I liked hippie beads and Bob Dylan. I didn’t like the war in Vietnam, and I didn’t like racism. I believed that “the times they were a changin”, and I wanted to help.

So that day, when Mr Yak overstepped his legal and ethical bounds as a teacher, and told me who I should and should not have lunch with, there was no containing my spontaneous indignation.

It only took two days for the school board and the NAACP to become involved in a process that would be long and drawn out, a process that would attempt to assassinate the character of a young student, and would only be resolved shortly after the very real assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. six months later.

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Diana Bardyn
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